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RASPUTIN, WARTS AND ALL

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Robert Massie's books include ''Nicholas and Alexandra'' and ''Peter the Great: His Life and World,'' which won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 198l. THE LIFE AND TIMES O F GRIGORII RASPUTIN By Alex de Jonge. Illustrated. 368 pp. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. $17.95. By ROBERT MASSIE

GRIGORY YEFIMOVICH RASPUTIN, a peasant born in a Siberian village in the 1860's, possessed unusual powers of healing. The nature of these powers we do not really know; the medical effect of their application we are just beginning to understand; the political impact of their employment we know all too well, for it changed the history of Russia and the world.

Stereotypically, Rasputin is known as a ''mad monk'' or a ''holy devil.'' He was neither mad nor a monk, and his holiness was mostly facade. The infernal side of his character and its effect on events were, unfortunately, very real. The historical Rasputin was a crude, persuasive, extravagantly self-confident man whose turbulent life was filled with confrontations, denunciations, wandering and finally - as a result of rumors about his holiness and reports of his remarkable cures - admission to successively grander society drawing rooms. In October 1905, he was introduced to the Emperor and Empress of Russia. It was a fateful moment. A year before, the Empress Alexandra had given birth to a son, having previously produced four daughters. Six weeks after the infant's birth, Alexandra and her husband, Nicholas II, discovered that their little Czarevitch Alexis, the heir to the throne, had hemophilia.

As the years went by and neither physicians nor prayers seemed able to help, Rasputin stepped forward. His visits did help, by distracting the boy and easing his pain, perhaps by actually controlling his bleeding, certainly by relieving the anguish suffered by the desperate mother. This performance soon gained Rasputin the confidence and support of the Empress. Her devotion was total; not even Rasputin's scandalous behavior, with its trail of empty bottles and ill-used women, could shake Alexandra's faith. Police reports and warnings by Government ministers that his antics were tainting the dynasty, worried suggestions from her husband that it might be better to send Rasputin away - all were brushed aside. How could they say this, ask this, when only Rasputin could save her son?

It is a bizarre, heart-rending story in which three strands - political, medical and personal - are intertwined. Any serious attempt to understand and describe Rasputin, it seems to me, should examine all three. Mr. de Jonge does not do this. His is a dull, shoddily written book about an extraordinarily interesting subject.

The political tale is one of catastrophe. A semiliterate muzhik makes his way up the ladder of Russian society into the presence of the imperial couple; his influence on political appointments grows, particularly after the Czar departs from Petrograd in 1915 to take command of the army, leaving the Government largely in the hands of his wife. She has frequent meetings with Rasputin followed by long, impassioned letters to her husband begging and cajoling him to remove Government ministers and appoint new men recommended by ''Our Friend'' (her name for Rasputin). The consequence is a ''ministerial leapfrog'' in which each new appointee is administratively inferior to the person he replaces, so that in February 1917, when the strains of war and winter are greatest, the Government is run by a collection of incompetents. This is the stuff of historical tragedy, in which Rasputin looms as a dark, almost demonic force.

The medical story is equally remarkable. Alexis suffered from classical hemophilia, inherited from his great-grandmother Queen Victoria through her granddaughter, his mother, the Empress Alexandra. It was not ''bleeding to death from a scratch'' that threatened him; it was prolonged internal bleeding into joints such as the knee, the ankle and the elbow, which caused intolerable pain, orthopedic deformation and, eventually, crippling. The treatment available today (transfusions of plasma extracts) was unknown then. Rasputin's role was to focus his brilliant, commanding eyes and reassuring voice on both son and mother. There is evidence that hypnosis or something like it can reduce bleeding by inducing calm, lowering blood pressure and contracting the blood vessels. What else it can do in a variety of medical situations is a matter of urgent and intriguing investigation today.

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Mr. de Jonge, who is a Fellow of New College, Oxford, skimps the political implications of Rasputin's role, almost wholly ignores the medical side and concentrates eagerly on the personal scandals. His interest is in the unwashed peasant taking women into his bedroom, the ''mad monk'' teaching them that before they can be saved they must well and truly sin, the ''holy devil'' letting his disciples wash his body in gratitude. Is this, then, a book of stimulating erotica? Not even that. Mr. de Jonge's inert style runs like this: Women ''were drawn to (Rasputin) for reasons that recall that mysterious but indubitable attraction that certain types - jockeys, boxers, professional huntsmen - have been known to hold for ladies very much their social superiors.''

Everything goes into Mr. de Jonge's pot - half-truths, errors, rumors, gossip, speculation, innuendo, snickers. And to protect himself, he writes tentative, conditional prose: ''Rasputin's daughter suggests''; ''Rasputin allegedly gave''; ''there is no intrinsic reason to doubt''; ''it is just conceivable that''; ''all one knows of the man suggests''; ''it must be admitted that''; ''we cannot say for sure''; ''all in all, it seems hardly likely.'' When he finally uncovers a fact, he nails it ecstatically to the page with a cliche: Rasputin's ''stock was low''; he sat surrounded by ''a bevy of lovelies''; he left town ''with his tail very much between his legs''; his brother ''really came to grief''; one of his enemies ''had bitten off more than he could chew.'' Humor comes in sniggering form: ''Oxford was scarcely the obvious choice for someone trying to lose the homosexual habit,'' he writes in describing Felix Yusupov, who eventually murdered Rasputin.

Errors and inconsistencies pop up like mushrooms in a Russian forest. Mr. de Jonge reports the wrong cause and the wrong site of Alexis' near-fatal injury in Poland in 1912; Catherine the Great's husband was Peter III, not Paul; the Old Palace at Tsarskoye Selo was built by Empress Elizabeth, not Catherine the Great. Some Russian names (Nicholas, Alexandra, Alexander) are Anglicized and others not (Grigorii, Aleksey). Further, I don't know what to make of Mr. de Jonge's assertion that ''the Soviet government now freely admits'' that an Old Gregorian faith healer ''restored a practically dying (Leonid) Brezhnev to sprightly health just in time for the Moscow Olympics.'' Somehow, I missed that admission by the Soviet authorities.

Finally, it affronts me that Mr. de Jonge focuses so much attention, not on Rasputin's eyes, which were his exceptional physical characteristic, but on a mechanism lower on the anatomy. We are informed that someone once told someone else that Rasputin ''had a large wart strategically situated ... which vastly enhanced his power to stimulate.'' We are told that wart and all were waved at the public in a nightclub as a means of establishing the owner's identity. We learn that ''it has been suggested'' that the curious member was removed by Rasputin's assassins and that someone ''claims to have seen it, preserved in a velvet container ... jealously guarded by some venerable White Russian ladies in Paris.'' Backing away from this freaky horror, Mr. de Jonge slanders an entire church, declaring that if in fact such an object is ''carefully preserved in some flat in Passy, it does not on the whole seem likely that it was once Rasputin's; the traffic in false relics has long been a feature of Orthodoxy.''

I spent two years at Oxford a number of years ago. I can't imagine any of the dons I knew writing a book like this. Times change, I suppose.

A version of this review appears in print on April 18, 1982, on Page 7007032 of the National edition with the headline: RASPUTIN, WARTS AND ALL. Today's Paper|Subscribe